655,000 Iraqis Killed as a Result of the US Invasion and Occupation, According to a Study by John Hopkins and Mustansiriya Universities

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The following news report is edited and may not represent the original version. See Al-Jazeerah Editor's note below for more details.

President Bush says he doesn't believe it. Some experts have a problem with it. But several others say it seems sound. Such was the varied reception for a new study that estimated the Iraq war has led to the deaths of nearly 655,000 Iraqis as of July.

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and the Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad derived that estimate from a door-to-door survey, conducted by doctors, of 1,849 households in Iraq. Taking the number of deaths reported by household residents, they extrapolated to a nationwide figure.

The researchers, reflecting the inherent uncertainties in such extrapolations, said they were 95 percent certain that the real number lay somewhere between 392,979 and 942,636 deaths.

Even the smaller figure is almost eight times the estimate some others have derived.

The new study - which attributes roughly 600,000 of the deaths directly to violence and 55,000 more to other war-related causes - was released Wednesday on the Web site of The Lancet, a respected medical journal. But just how good is its conclusions?

"That 650,000 number seems way, way beyond any number that I have seen," Casey said. "I've not seen a number higher than 50,000. And so I don't give it that much credibility at all."

And neither does Michael E. O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, which also tracks Iraqi deaths.

Other research methods on the ground, like body counts, forensic analysis and taking eyewitness reports, have produced numbers only about one-tenth as high, he said. "I have a hard time seeing how all the direct evidence could be that far off ... therefore I think the survey data is probably what's wrong."

However, several biostatisticians and survey experts were supportive of the work.

"Given the conditions (in Iraq), it's actually quite a remarkable effort," said Steve Heeringa, director of the statistical design group at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

He said the study made "minor departures" from the standards generally used in national surveys for choosing what households to interview. Whether those departures, brought on by wartime conditions in Iraq, introduced a bias in the results is impossible to measure from the data alone, he said.

Frank Harrell Jr., chair of the biostatistics department at Vanderbilt University, called the study design solid and said it included "rigorous, well-justified analysis of the data."

And Richard Brennan, head of health programs at the New York-Based International Rescue Committee, said the study's survey approach was typical.

"This is the most practical and appropriate methodology for sampling that we have in humanitarian conflict zones," said Brennan, whose group has conducted similar projects in Kosovo, Uganda and Congo.

"While the results of this survey may startle people, it's hard to argue with the methodology at this point."

Donald Berry, chairman of the statistics department at the University of Texas' M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said he believes the study was done "in a reasonable way." But he said the range of uncertainty given for the estimates was much too narrow, because of potential statistical biases in the survey.

While it's impossible to calculate a better range that accounts for that, he said, it wouldn't be surprising if the low end dropped about four-fold to 100,000 deaths. A wider range of uncertainty would make the 655,000 figure less meaningful, he said.

Meanwhile, one of the study's authors said he's confident in the work's conclusions.

If the estimate seems high, it's because the door-to-door survey turned up deaths that are typically overlooked when sought by other means in wartime situations, said Les Roberts, who was with Johns Hopkins when he co-authored the study but has just taken a post at Columbia University.

As for extrapolating a nationwide figure from the sample of the few hundred deaths actually reported, "almost every statistic you've ever heard about health in America comes from a sample," Roberts said. "It may not be extremely precise, but at least it gets us in the right ballpark."

UN reports, US military commanders, and Iraqi officials reported that more than one hundreds Iraqis were killed every day in the past recent months. However, the Empire corporate media units (AP, Reuters, CNN, Fox News, BBC, etc.) barely report on less than fifty people killed everyday.

Apparently, corporate media have been participant in a concerted effort to cover up the horrors of the US War in Iraq, and make it sound less intense than what it is in reality.

Sometimes, the corporate media do not report any war news at all from Iraq or Afghanistan. They even systematically call daily fighting "violence" to make it sound like "domestic violence," not war.

See Al-Jazeerah Editor's note below with regard to the purported Iraqi Shi'i-Sunni civil war.

It is inaccurate to describe the war in Iraq as if it is fought between Muslim Shi'is and Muslim Sunnis, as the US corporate media have been trying hard to do.

It is more accurate to describe it as fought between US-led forces and Iraqi resistance fighters. Even killing civilians is part of the war, as the evidence earlier demonstrated that Interior Ministry death squads and British soldiers were caught either targeting or attempting to target civilians to make the war appear as if it is between Shi'is and Sunnis.

This purported Shi'i-Sunni civil war in Iraq aims at distracting Iraqis and dividing their country into three regions, in preparation for a final partition and dismemberment of Iraq. Previous statements of Iraqi elected officials pointed fingers to death squads of the Interior Ministry.

Moreover, on September 19, 2005, two British soldiers were arrested by Iraqi police for driving a car bomb in a Basra street. They were freed by British forces before being interrogated by Iraqi police. This incident sheds some light on who might be behind car bomb explosions in Iraq.